Ernest endeavours

WHEN Gorbys nightclub opened in Cork City 30 years ago, its owners didn’t know then that its next investor/part-owner had only just been born.

Entrepreneurial bar and restaurant owner, 30-year-old Ernest Cantillon, is the fresh investor and co-owner of the 20,000 sq ft Bróg, and Gorbys, on Oliver Plunkett Street, where a €1.5m investment is underway, due to re-open early in the New Year. It will join a reinvigorated Cork City nightclub scene, following last week’s multi-million euro makeover of the Savoy, on Patrick Street.

Mr Cantillon is investing €250,000 in a new river-view Fish Bar restaurant on the terrace of his €3m bar/restaurant Electric, developed in 2010 in partnership with restaurateur Denis Mullane, and he has also leased the adjacent kiosk on the Grand Parade/South Mall for another food business.

The developments are the latest in a successful food-and-drink partnership model. Mr Cantillon opened Sober Lane, on Sullivan’s Quay, seven years ago, aged 23, and quips “my customers’ age profile is growing with me”. He and Gorbys’ long-time owners, Don Forde and Neil Cronin, have O’Shea’s builders busy on the upper floors of Gorbys, fitting out a two-storey 700-person nightclub and extensive roof garden.

They’ll then turn attention to the highly popular ground-floor Bróg complex, keeping the name and the feel, and will start a food business (likely to be Mexican) in the premises as well, given its proximity to the English Market.

Currently, the Oliver Plunkett Street complex employs 11 full-time, and 21 part-time, and employment should double when it’s fully up and running.

Meanwhile, at Electric — which does a 50:50 food/drink trade, there are 40 jobs, while Sober Lane (which does 80:20 drink/food trade) employs about 20 in all.

The riverside kiosk, serving ice creams and flat-bread pizzas, will add further jobs.

Backed by Bank of Ireland in his several ventures, Mr Cantillon is overseeing the design and fit-out of Gorbys, while architect Huw O’Toole is involved in the redesign of Electric to cater for the new Fish Bar, a 40-seat seafood speciality restaurant, which will operate a no-booking policy.